Incorrect OS Type is sent with Basic Inventory NSE

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The issue is as described below:

1. Customer has all the client Operating systems in his environment with Windows different versions.
2. On Symantec Management Console under Resource Manager of most of the computers, it shows the "OS Name" as Windows 7 Professional but "OS Type" as Business. Similarly  it shows the "OS Name" as Windows 10 Enterprise but "OS Type" as Professional.
3. Customer wants to know why is the OS Type displayed as incorrect.

Why are the NSE files collecting the OS Type as wrong type.

Environment

ITMS (IT Management Suite) 7.5.1, 7.6, 8.0 and 8.1.

Cause

This "OS Type" field is a legacy field.

Resolution

If you look at lower part of identification table you'll see something like below:

------------------------------------------------------
GUID {C414B2F9-0B04-4FA8-A72F-6562778D3F9D}
Name Win7-Lab01
Domain WORKGROUP
System Type Win64
OS Name Windows 7 Professional
OS Type Business
OS Version 6.1
OS Revision Service Pack 1
......
......
......
Unique ID 271F4D56-19D9-6072-5EE9-812D81932F1C
Timezone Bias 120
Hardware Serial Number VMware-56 4d 1f 27 d9 19 72 60-5e e9 81 2d 81 93 2f 1c
BIOS Serial Number VMware-56 4d 1f 27 d9 19 72 60-5e e9 81 2d 81 93 2f 1c
HW Chassis Serial Number None
OS System Mask (HEX) 010200182000200a
OS System Mask - Platform Win
OS System Mask - Type Workstation
OS System Mask - OS Name Windows 7
OS System Mask - Hardware Platform Intel
OS System Mask - Processor Architecture 64-bit
OS System Mask - Tag Flags 
OS System Mask - Service Pack Service Pack 1
OS System Mask - OS Edition Professional
OS Comparable Version (HEX) 000600011db10000
OS Comparable Version (decoded) 6.1.7601.0
OS Canonical Name Windows 7
------------------------------------------------------

There is OS System Mask in HEX - 010200182000200a
This value is a bit mask containing all the info about OS. The mask fields are decrypted just below the HEX value, look at the last field "OS System Mask - OS
Edition Professional". This is the right value.

Anyone who wants to get the correct results should use System Mask starting with 8.0 release. This mask was introduced to speed up SQL queries on the server side because it's faster to compare numbers and bits than strings and to introduce some logic and order into how SMP differentiate between different OS version.

About the legacy fields: we could not remove them.
We could not remove the legacy field because there are still 3rd party and solution code that uses them, we encourage everyone to use the new fields in the new code at least but that takes time anyway.
For the same reason we have not fixed bugs in the old OS detection code because some Solutions relies on these incorrect names agent provided.